Going from Founder to CEO is the Path to Growth – Behind the Scenes
One big challenge I see with leaders today is getting stuck in the day-to-day of the business. You tell me that they know they should go from Founder to CEO. You feel the need within the organization to improve your strategic leadership. Yet, you are covered up with day-to-day work. In this episode of behind the scenes, we look at four steps of going from Founder to CEO. You may feel triggered when you hear this episode. It challenges some deep-seated issues that keep you from Founder to CEO. I get it better than most. I battle with these too. My clients fight with them. I made this video so you can be intentional about your journey from Founder to CEO.
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Going from Founder to CEO is the Path to Growth: The Transcript
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Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
[0:00]
One of the things I love most about what I’m doing is I get to talk to founders and CEOs about what does it take to grow their companies fast.
[0:07]
This week, I’ve talked to 16 different founders, CEOs, about growing fast. One of the things I hear all the time is how difficult it is to go from founder to CEO. This whole concept of being a founder and creating this new opportunity in the market and building a team around it is fantastic. But in order to reach the next level of success, many times you have to let go of all of the thinking and all of the stuff that goes with being a founder to truly being the CEO, the visionary, the strategic thinker of the company. And it’s hard, because you have done all this work as the founder, and you know how to do everything in the company.
[0:51]
But getting to the level of CEO means you have to be able to let go of some of the things that you were doing to reach this new level of thinking. A new level of communication within the company, I’m going to go over four specific things that you can do to improve that journey from founder to CEO. And you can learn from this because I’ve been thinking about this a long time as I work with companies that want to continue that level of growth.
[1:16]
So let’s look at how to be a strategic thinker and be the visionary for your company. The first thing you want to pay attention to is your day to day involvement with tasks and projects in the business. Now, you’ve probably been involved with sales or product development or some other element of the business from the beginning, you know it like the back of your hand. But here’s the problem. If you don’t let go of some of those tasks, if you’re not empowering your team, then they’re not feeling the trust that you can actually, they can do it for you. Now you don’t have to let go of absolutely everything, because that would put you doing nothing, but you’re going to replace it with the higher value work.
[1:56]
What I find is a lot of leaders and founders get stuck into, you know, processing their email, and maybe even invoicing clients or being a part of client delivery meetings and things like that. Those are important in the early stages of business. But as you become the CEO, they’re less important. You must empower your team to do those for you. And as you’re growing, that’s necessary.
[2:22]
Letting Go is hard, but also worth it. Your second focus inside of this journey to begin the CEO is connecting the dots, being able to look at the teams that you have in the company, being a look at strategic partners, liquid customers, and your ability to see patterns to be able to better deliver them better to innovate. All of that thinking allows you to have conversations with your teams that you wouldn’t have if you’re in the day to day if you’re stuck invoicing stuck in your email inbox. Connecting the Dots is about looking at data, looking at the trends, looking everything going on, and how it all relates together. If you become good at what you really are on your journey to being a strategic thinker. And being the visionary that you want to be.
[3:09]
Number three, prioritizing your time to think, is so valuable, that you may not even realize it, that you’re not putting it on the schedule, you’re not being intentional about it. having time to think means that you don’t have meetings back to back all the time that you have a day, or maybe a half a day, where you actually are thinking about the business thinking about things that no one else is thinking about because they’re focused on the day to day and you’re able to look beyond that. When you think about your business, you have to have that balance between what’s going on in the future and what’s going on right now. You also have the ability to look backward and learn from that. But you must be able to prioritize time to think if you want to be that strategic thinker and visionary for your business.
[3:57]
Time to think is something that people think that they’re doing, but they don’t actually do the thinking they get their To-Do List done. And that’s not what I’m talking about here. It’s not time to do stuff, it’s time to think about what’s really going on the people, the relationships, all that must be prioritized. And I think you have to schedule it if you want to make it work. And I also believe that a lot of the serious issues that you have, when you create time to think you will think about it when you’re not thinking about it. What do I mean by that is you will be able to process some of these decisions when you are in the shower, maybe even sleeping, or at the gym, driving.
[4:37]
All of the activities that take your mind off of it. Your subconscious is working on some of these difficult questions and difficult projects inside the company. But you’ve got to prioritize time to think. All right, number four.
[4:50]
This is a big one because a lot of organizations have not really understood the power of this. But number four is proactive, by default. Being proactive means that you are being intentional about what you’re creating what’s moving forward in the business, the systems that you’re creating in the business that allows you to, to create predictable level of service, predictable sales, predictable lead generation, predictable product management, that is really important for you to have a culture that is proactive. But what happens usually is the culture becomes reactive. If you feel like a firefighter in some way, then you are in a reactive culture.
[5:30]
If you spend 80% of your time or more thinking about the proactive elements, how do we get ahead of these things? How do we get ahead of our customer needs? How do we get ahead of the resources that are necessary cash flow, that’s being proactive? So as a default, are you being proactive?
[5:50]
All of this wraps up together into you being a better leader, to be able to be that visionary that you need to be letting go of the founder’s level of thinking to Be the CEO of the company. Hopefully, this is helpful. I love what I do. I get to work with founders and CEOs of their teams, and many different aspects of how they’re growing and evolving as leaders and as companies.
[6:12]
I’d love to help you this is just a little bit from behind the scenes, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you share this with someone else that you think would be helpful too. If there’s anything I can do for you, make sure you reach out to me [email protected], as always lead with courage. I’ll see you next time.
Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
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